So what can you do with the PI System?
We'll take a look at one use case
and show you an example of what life is like without the PI System and what it can be with the PI system.
There are a number of outcomes that the PI System can help you achieve.
These include asset health, process optimization,
quality tracking, energy efficiency, regulatory compliance, and safety and security.
There are more solutions that the PI System can help you with, but let's take a look at just asset health for now.
In this particular use case, we have a wind farm that can't meet their generation target.
The wind turbine availability is low due to curtailment and unplanned downtime.
Our target given to us by the executive team is to increase wind turbine availability to 95 percent.
We aim to achieve this by finding the biggest cause of lost production.
Let's take a look at the PI System in action and see how we can use some of our tools like PI Vision
to see what's going on in our operations.
Our wind farm company is called Windtopia.
This is a screen that the executives might see. I'm interested in my KPIs like total production, turbines available
and I have a few different wind farms that I can take a look at.
I'm only in charge of one wind farm in this case. Perhaps a Black Mesa wind farm.
I can click in and see what's going on with that specific operation field.
I can see that I have several turbines of this wind farm and
all of them have differing availabilities.
I can see a number of other pieces of data on this display and
I notice that I really want to check what's going on with turbine 5
The efficiency is pretty low and I'm concerned that there's something going on.
With another click, I'm looking at what a maintenance engineer might take a look at out in the field.
My turbine 5 has some events associated with it and perhaps these are calculating all the downtime that's occurring.
With just a few clicks I've gone from an executive view all the way down to what a maintenance engineer might need to see
in order to take action and fix whatever's going on.
I have different kinds of indicators, different kinds of trends and displays and all my data is in one central location.
I can easily share this with whoever needs to see it.
Now let's take a look at creating a simple report.
We'll look first without the PI System and then we'll see what life is like with the PI System in place.
My company I have a wider range of data sources and I have some infrastructure to manage all the data.
Overall, things are likely pretty messy.
People may not have access to what they need to see and it might not be very intuitive,
where data is coming from and where you need to access it from.
All of this put together
is a form of a data infrastructure,
but there's no real sense to it and it'd be very difficult to maintain or train people as to how to use this efficiently.
We'd like to go from silos and complexity
and life without the PI System to something a bit better later on.
Here's how we can build out a report without using the PI System.
I have two sites in my wind farm company North Fork and Springfield and each of them have slightly different SCADA systems.
In order to calculate my lost production, I'll first need to talk to contacts at each of these sites. I'll gather the turbine status data
and I now have the raw data but in slightly different formats.
This may be workable and I'll convert the status data into a list of events to calculate my loss production.
Next, I remember my downtime report isn't everything and I need to know the weather data around these systems.
So I talked to my contacts from the different met towers and they each send me their spreadsheets with the met data.
I now need to hook up to my corporate database and get the power curves from a database.
All of this is going into the same report and things are already getting pretty complicated.
Now I have to run some calculations.
I do all these calculations manually,
maybe if I'm lucky I have a macro set up or some other way to calculate everything
once I put it into the right format on this spreadsheet.
Once I've done all the data crunching, I can now create my report.
I have to talk to my different contacts at each site as well as each meteorological tower.
I had to get all the data in one place and I had to convert the data into the same format.
Once I published the report I sent it along to the executive team and my manager is so impressed,
they asked me to start over and do the same thing next week.
Oh boy!
This is a very difficult way to maintain your systems and be able to execute on looking at your entire operations holistically.
We want to go from silos and complexity to standards and simplicity.
There are three layers of: collect, store & enhance and deliver.
We're able to take all of the complicated data sources,
put them into one central location and have our users access them in a smart and efficient way.
Let's take a look at building out that same report with a PI System Infrastructure in place:
I have my two sites again.
Now, the data sources including the Met towers are sending all their data to the PI System Infrastructure.
I can also add the corporate database with all the power curve information and link it straight into my PI System Infrastructure.
The PI system allows you to do analytics and calculations right inside it, so now I'm able to calculate my downtime loss power
and I can even have an automated BI report.
Now that the data is going in here on an automated schedule, no people need to be involved,
no contacts need to happen and I'm able to publish this report or modify it as I need
on a daily, monthly, yearly basis. However you need it.
In the next video we'll talk about the PI System Infrastructure in more detail.
We'll take a look at the different PI system tools and components and break them down into the collection, store & enhancing and delivering layers.